New Story & Art Board

A new Story & Art board has been opened up, aiming to give summoners a better place to talk about the creative side of League of Legends! Riot Opeli and IronStylus have both jumped on the newly launched board to kick up the conversation!

What are you waiting for? Go jump on the new board to get to your questions and discussion in!

Where Story Happens

Riot Opeli headed up the Story discussion on the new Story & Art Board with a thread highlighting the goals behind the new board:

"Hey everyone,

Welcome to the Story and Art board!

If you’re an old soul from the previous boards, you may have noticed these aren't the forums you're used to, and maybe that change is a little intimidating. But we don't want your interactions with other players to be any different than they were on our forums.

If you’re new here, you may be wondering: what IS this place, and what is it for?

Let’s run it down with some guidelines:

This is a place to talk about or speculate on existing stories and champions. Digging Xerath’s betrayal of Azir? The rivalry between Garen and Darius? Graves and Twisted Fate’s ongoing tension? Talk about it here!

Fanfiction, fanart, champion concepts, and other lovely things like that should NOT be posted here. This board is for discussion on League of Legends’ canon story.

Upvote/downvote on content! Votes are your friends! Downvotes should be used for comments and discussions that aren't relevant or don’t add to the discussion - they shouldn't be used to express disagreement with another player.

Use those filters! There are filters on each Board that let you sort by Recent, Hot, or Best. We've also implemented a much better search function on Boards. Seriously, it's much more effective than the old forums.

Also, we’ve recently done a lot of story things you may have missed – here are a few links to get the discussion going! CHECK 'EM:

What I have taken from the quote from the dev blog. Everything post-Shurima event will now be canon, and everything pre-Shurima event should be treated as a different universe or a different telling of possible future events? (similar to comic books I guess?)

That's pretty close - what hasn't changed is any of the champions' personalities and the majority of what you know about them, to be honest. If you go through bios that mention the IoW, all you have to do is omit the League part in your brain. They're different canons, and we won't be expanding on the old one.

We normally alter a champion's story during an event or champ rework, so that they feel more cohesive with the new canon. You guys have seen this happen for the past two years or so.

For example, Cass is still from Noxus and Kat's sister, even though we've embedded her into the new Shurima story. She's still a seductress and a little less liked than Kat. But instead of having her cursed from Joe Schmoe from Freljord, we wanted her entwined (HEH) with a bigger storyline and other champions.

The core things you know about champions remain the same... For example, Nasus used to be a space librarian. Now he's not from space; his previous lore revolved around "How do we get him to Runeterra and care about it?!" and it had him summoned to Runeterra against his will - we don't want that constraint, and frankly, that plot point makes me super sad as a writer. But he still retains his personality and his relationship with his brother, since those are the things that are key to Nasus, not the fact that Summoners channeled him to fight for them for reasons."

Everybody Arts

On the other side of the creative coin, IronStylusjumped in with a heads up on what to expect out of the Art side of the new Story & Art board:

"Hey everyone!

Welcome to the Story & Art board!

I wanted to take some time to discuss this board from the standpoint of art. A lot of teams at Riot are touched by art in some way or another. There's a lot of disciplines working together all the time to create awesome content. Some of the components of the Art Team are:

Concept - Usually 2D artists in charge of the idea phase of an asset. Concept artists work on everything from character creation, to environment design, UI and illustration. They help flesh out our world and design the next new thing, or reinvent the old.

3D Character - 3D artists who work in Zbrush, Maya and other programs to built and texture the character models you see in game. Whether they be champions, skins, creatures, or anything that's a life form, these guys make it into an actual thing.

3D Environment - 3D artists who make our maps in which our characters live in. They use the same tools as character artists to build the world that the game is played in. They set the stage for our characters to stand on.

Animation - Animators bring static objects to life. Anything that has to move is moved by them. Characters that run, creatures who hop, structures that crumble. If it moves, our animators made it do so.

VFX - Visual Effects Artists, sometimes referred to as Particle Artists, are responsible for our effects in the game. Whether they come from a character, a prop, a creature, or an item. VFX artists make the spells fly.

Motion Graphics - MoGraph artists bring our login screens to life. They make our mana bars bubble, our logos move and generally make a ton of awesome. They weave spells which I still don't understand to move 2D assets and make them live.

LOTS OF OTHER ARTISTS - We never want to leave anyone out, but we have a ton of amazing people who work in the Art Team, and I may be forgetting some. Hopefully they'll come smack me on the back of the head if I forget them.

For art discussions in this board, here's what we'd like to do! Generally this is a place where we'd like to host discussions about art in League of Legends. This means that this is the place to discuss such things as, but not limited to:

Character design: How our champions, skins, creatures or other characters look and feel.

Art process: How we go about designing, creating and bringing to life the things you see in League of Legends.

Feedback: You letting us know what you think, and us letting you know why we do the things we do. A two-way street for us to jam.

Those are just a few topics that can be encompassed in this board. If you want to know how we make art, this is the place to find out!! If you notice a mistake, feel passionate about a direction we've taken, or just want to discuss art in general, here's your place! Promoting a respectful and engaging place for our artists to post and our players to ask, discuss, or just hang out.

As a side note, skin and champion concepts should be posted elsewhere on the Boards. We love your art and ideas; however, please share them on the Skins & Champion Concepts board!

"Absolutely. Anything dealing with how you think a champion looks, to how you think a champion should look. This is where we deal with existing art in the game basically, or discuss how things could evolve/change/improve, etc."

"If by ghosts you mean the wraith camp, we wanted to make sure that the creatures that inhabited SR felt appropriate to the magic-forest vibe that SR has... things that feel like "beasts" or otherwise feel like the jungle could be their power source. Wraiths are a cool monster, but they feel much more at home on a haunted map like Twisted Treeline. That was basically our reasoning, AFAIK."

Leona Portrait

In the Story & Art boards, IronStylus also shared a portrait of Leona:

"Been practicing painting recently, because unlike my fellow Riot artists, I'm not the best at it. But in celebration of the new S&A board..

..have a slightly sad looking Leona practice portrait!"

Reborn - Part 1: Glory happens in Past

After today's exciting REBORN teaser, Grumpy Monkey shared that the story starts out in the past!

This may be helpful for deducing which JARVAN ( As our in-game Jarvan is Jarvan IV and his father is the Jarvan III and the current King of Demacia, both of which are currently alive.) was crushed by our Noxian hero until the other parts of the story are revealed!

If you are looking for more info on the Lightshields, Demacia's royal family: